Here's something I find fascinating. If you work with information for a living—you research, analyse, write, advise, teach, plan—you're a knowledge worker. It's literally in the job title.
And almost none of us ever try to get better at managing knowledge.
The athlete test
Think about an athlete. They're continually looking for ways to improve. They stretch themselves just beyond their current ability, review what went wrong, adjust, and go again. That's deliberate practice.
Now think about how you handle information at work. Meetings, articles, reports, emails, courses. How do you take notes? How do you decide what's worth keeping? How do you find it again next month?
If you're like most people, you've never given it a moment's thought. You do what you did at school. Cal Newport puts it perfectly in So Good They Can't Ignore You:
"Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital."
Read that last sentence again. It's great news. The bar is on the floor.
What it looks like in practice
I've taught this method to PhD students, working professionals and self-learners, and the benefits show up differently depending on who you are.
If you're a PhD student, your job is to take in many papers, books and journals, compare them, question them, and find a problem nobody has solved. You can't do that if every source lives in its own long document and you're sifting through them each time you form a hypothesis. You need your sources broken into pieces you can actually work with, and a way to ask questions that expose the gaps in your understanding. Those gaps tell you what to research next.
If you're a professional, the payoff is being the person who can speak with confidence and authority. The one who remembers the insight from that book six months ago and applies it to today's problem. The one who has already thought it through when the pitch, the proposal or the difficult decision lands on their desk.
If you're an entrepreneur, you're learning marketing, leadership, product and fundraising all at once. A knowledge system lets you turn that stream of content into decisions, rather than a pile of bookmarks.
Different goals, same underlying skill.
It isn't only about work
I'll add one that's close to home. Imagine you or someone you love becomes unwell. Suddenly you're drowning in information you don't understand, conflicting opinions and snippets of advice, and you have to make decisions based on it.
I will never understand why we don't take a notepad to the doctor.
Managing knowledge is a life skill, and like any skill, it can be improved.
Start with a small experiment
You don't need to overhaul anything. For the next two weeks, pick one source of learning in your working life—a book, a course, a weekly industry newsletter—and treat it as practice:
- Capture what matters in your own words
- Write down one question the material raises
- At the end of the week, spend ten minutes reading back what you wrote and ask yourself: what do I now think about this?
You'll quickly feel the difference between "consuming" and "practising".
I should be clear about my goal here. I'm not trying to help you build the perfect knowledge system. I'm trying to help you go on and do great things with what you know.
Ready to practise properly?
Atomic Note-Taking is a complete method for turning what you read into original thinking, with examples for students, researchers, professionals and creators. It's the system I wish I'd had when I started.
